Forget global warming or war, nothing can kill off a society faster than losing contact with neighbours.
Being shut off from its trading partner about 400 years ago, was a deathwish for a tiny Polynesian community in the Pitcairn Islands on the eastern edge of the Pacific rim.
In a new international bestselling book by Pulitzer Prize winner Professor Jared Diamond, University of Queensland archaeologist Dr Marshall Weisler has revealed how trade in tools, food, plants and marriage partners was vital for survival in the Pitcairn Islands.
Diamond's book, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive (currently third on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover non-fiction), delves into the mysterious collapses of past civilisations and what it means for our future.
Chapter three, The last people alive, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, explains how people arrived in the resource-poor Pitcairn Group about 1000 years ago.
Dr Weisler said small founding groups were only sustainable with outside help from their trading partners on Mangareva, islands about 400 kilometres to the west.
He traces the pre-historic downfall of a small society who lived on the jagged limestone of Henderson, about 100 kilometres north of Pitcairn Island made famous by the mutiny of the English naval ship Bounty in 1789.
"It's a marginal place. It's a raised limestone island with a very rough landscape and limited fresh water that could only support a few dozen people," Dr Weisler said.
"The interior of the island (Henderson) is a wasteland.
"We were trying to figure out, what were people doing here in the first place."
He details how these Polynesians almost become extinct as they slowly lost touch which their neighbours and bigger trading partners in the Mangareva islands.
"After colonisation of the Pitcairn Group at about AD800, there was a continuous exchange of stone adzes (blades), pearl shell fishhooks, volcanic oven stones, planting stock, pigs and the like from the high volcanic islands of Mangareva," he said.
"After trade ended, about AD1450, the small communities on Pitcairn and Henderson died out and were found abandoned in 1606 by the Spanish explorer Ferdinand Queros.
"This is a classic example of the need to maintain good relations with your neighbours."
He said the Polynesian decline showed that successful societies were those in which people enjoyed good
relations with neighbours.
"It shows that trading partners are extremely useful even in our world today as everyone is connected some way or another."
Dr Weisler has spent more than 15 years conducting archaeological research in the Pitcairn Islands.
Media: contact Dr Weisler (phone: 07 3365 3038, email: m.weisler@uq.edu.au) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (phone: 3365 2619, email: m.holland@uq.edu.au)
